Opportunities in the Resource Sector: Brien Lundin Interview

Partial Transcript:
Futremoneytrends.com: Greetings, and thank you for joining us at futuremoneytrends.com. I'm here with Brien Lundin. He has a career spanning three decades in the investment markets and newsletter business helping investors find the right investments. He's the CEO and president of Jefferson Financial under the Jefferson Financial umbrella, Brien publishes and edits Gold Newsletter, a cornerstone of precious metal advisories since 1971, wow. And everyone knows that's a key date for gold, 1971. Brien, thank you so much for joining us.

Brien Lundin: Great to talk with you.

Futremoneytrends.com: Brien, a lot of people who are investing in inflation, or investing because they're concerned about inflation in the economy, or supply and demand of resources, have gone into the junior resource sector and over the past few years it's been kind of a bloodbath for investors, and I want to find out from you, with you looking at all the sectors for different resources and opportunities: is there anything out there that stands out that has an extreme value situation? Where obviously we've got gold down, silver down, uranium down, natural gas, but is there anything out there that might be a major opportunity for people right now?

Brien Lundin: Well, when you look at it you have to consider what's happened to the broader market, and we had a tremendous bull run this century, really since 2000 in precious metals, and the junior mining stocks really leveraged those gains. And what was happening then, there were a number of factors. There was obviously the rise of the developing countries, rise of China and the strain that that was putting on the broader commodity sector and metals, but you also had a large scale monetary reflation. Across the world fiat currencies were being reduced at greater and greater rates, and debts were being piled up, particularly in the west, at greater and greater rates. And we reached kind of an inflection point and — actually kind of a stumbling block in 2008 with the credit crisis. That only exacerbated the long term trends. It made and makes the long going creation of fiat currencies even more necessary and more traumatic. Since 2008 what we've seen is that the juniors didn't provide any leverage to underlying rise in metal prices and even the majors didn't and the reason for that is people wanted to buy gold and silver as safe havens as protection against the monetary inflation, and the general economic environment, the general investing environment was very risk averse. Nobody wanted paper, they wanted the real thing, which was gold and silver. So the equities were actually greater due to lack of demands and lack of any buying pressure. In the current environment I think we're at another crucial turning point. We've had about a two year correction in precious metals, and we've seen the gold and silver come up from late June bottoms, this supply situation is extremely tight, almost unprecedented levels, and the junior equities have started to respond to that. I do think the future for precious metals related junior resource stocks is very positive going forward. With that said though. there is going to be a lot of volatility, so if investors can look for markets where there are long term trends and/or special situations that create near term opportunities, those are particularly attractive these days. One of the areas that I've seen is uranium.

Futremoneytrends.com: You know I've seen a lot of people talk about uranium over the years you know Rick Role and people at Mara Catusa and David Morgan, and yourself. And it's kinda like uranium has just been beaten down everyone kind of thought that the worst was over — at least in my opinion I kinda thought it was. And now it's below 50, now we're below 40. Is 2014 going to be the year for uranium to recover, since the Fukashima accident, and then is this even sustainable? Are companies going to start shutting down mines at these prices?

Brien Lundin: Well, I think 2014 will be the year for a number of reasons. The price of uranium — we had that first stage of uranium mania in the junior resource market, I guess it was about five years ago now, really closer to six years, in 2007. It reached 140 dollars a pound and any company that had any relation to uranium was trading for — juniors were trading for dollars a share, regardless of what they had. Whatever moose pasture or prospects they had. So there was a tremendous shake out in that area, and then we started — well the 2008 credit crisis devastated the sector and uranium prices as well, and nobody wanted these equities. Subsequent to that we started to have a rebound in uranium prices, then the Fukashima disaster put an end to that. Right now we're just coming out of that Fukashima spawned correction in the uranium market.